A high ranking VP of a corporate giant becomes the new CEO of a company in a different business, in a different country. He doesn’t sell his home in Seattle, nor does his family move with him, even though he’s ostensibly going to be there permanently. Over the next three years, he makes counterintuitive decisions that abandon his new company’s core strengths, and their value plummets to a tiny fraction of what it was.

You get the idea. Essentially, the theory here — and this has been floating around for a while — is that Stephen Elop became the CEO of Nokia to soften the company up for the Microsoft takeover left Nokia without its hardware business.

As noted in a Nokia proxy filing, Elop will collect a pay package valued at roughly $25.4 million when things are all settled. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the vast majority of that cash will come from Microsoft, which is picking up 70 percent of the bill. Nokia itself will be responsible for the remaining 30 percent.

I mention both the Nokia conspiracy and Elop’s payout not to give too much credence to the former, but rather to illustrate just how nonsensical the entire series of events has been so far.

Often, even the most zany of conspiracy theories contain some grain of truth.